SOURCE: Sherwin-White, A. N. “General Introduction to the Private Letters.” In The Letters of Pliny: A Historical and Social Commentary, pp. ix-xli. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.

In the following essay, Sherwin-White praises the formal, yet simple language used by Pliny to illustrate the major themes and subjects in his Letters,, discusses their chronology and composition, and evaluates their authenticity as correspondence.

I. the Origins and Characteristics of the Letters

Satura nostra tota est, was the Roman claim. They might have added epistula quoque, with justice so far as the surviving literature is concerned.1 There is a chapter on the theory of letter-writing in a late Greek treatise, Demetrius, De Interpretatione 223-39, and the late rhetoricians have left behind two summaries of types of letters, the formae epistolicae and the characteres epistolici, with short examples of each type. The numbering of types is twenty-one and forty-one respectively (p. 42). But the...